16 Inquiries into Human Faculty
what was going on over or between their heads; I rarely can do so now.
The athletic achievements at school and college are much superior to what they used to be. Part is no doubt due to more skilful methods of execution, but not all. I cannot doubt that the more wholesome and abundant food, the moderation in drink, the better cooking, the warmer wearing apparel, the airier sleeping rooms, the greater cleanliness, the more complete change in holidays, and the healthier lives led by the women in their girlhood, who become mothers afterwards, have a great influence for good on the favoured portion of our race.
The proportion of weakly and misshapen individuals is not to be estimated by those whom we meet in the streets; the worst cases are out of sight. We should parade before our mind’s eye the inmates of the lunatic, idiot, and pauper asylums, the prisoners, the patients in hospitals, the sufferers at home, the crippled, and the congenitally blind, and that large class of more or less wealthy persons who flee to the sunnier coasts of England, or expatriate themselves for the chance of life. There can hardly be a sadder sight than the crowd of delicate English men and women with narrow chests and weak chins, scrofulous, and otherwise gravely affected, who are to he found in some of these places. Even this does not tell the whole of the story; if there were a conscription in England, we should find, as in other countries, that a large fraction of the men who earn their living by sedentary occupations are unfit for military service. Our human civilised stock is far more weakly through congenital imperfection than that of any other species of animals, whether wild or domestic.
It is, however, by no means the most shapely or the biggest personages who endure hardship the best. Some very shabby-looking men have extraordinary stamina. Sickly-looking and puny residents in towns may have a more suitable constitution for the special conditions of their lives, and may in some sense be better knit and do more work and live longer than much haler men imported to the same locality from elsewhere. A wheel and a barrel seem to have the flimsiest possible constitutions;, they
